Platform Overview

One of the primary benefits of on-demand software is how easy and inexpensive it is to get started—there’s no hardware, software, or related infrastructure to purchase and maintain. Instead, customers simply choose a subscription level that matches their needs while their vendor takes care of everything else.

Everything else, of course, includes a vendor’s “service delivery”—the complex technologies and processes that protect each customer’s data from both physical loss and unauthorized use, guarantee that data is available around the clock and without delay, and ensure that the vendor can maintain acceptable service delivery as the customer’s user base, applications, and number of transactions grow.

With more than 10 years of experience in delivering highly available, secure, and scalable on-demand applications, no one knows more about on-demand service delivery than salesforce.com. Salesforce has identified the following seven standards of on-demand service delivery (download PDF). Salesforce lives by these standards and we recommend you hold all of your on-demand service providers to these standards as well.

Trust and Transparency: Real time performance and availability data is made available at trust.salesforce.com.

True Multi-Tenancy: The key innovation that makes on-demand service delivery possible is a multitenant architecture, in which all users and applications share a single, common infrastructure and code base that is centrally maintained (like eBay or Google), maximizing performance and reliability and making upgrades a snap.

Proven Scale: The platform is currently being used by over 41,000 customers, 1.1 million users with more than three billion transactions per quarter.

High Performance: The platform has a track record of fast application performance everywhere in the world (as required for global suppliers) both for the delivery of Web pages and for transaction processing.

Complete Disaster Recovery: Seamless disaster recovery is made possible by fully mirrored data centers. Maintaining a full-scale backup facility enables salesforce.com to deliver consistent performance and reliability even in the event of a regional disaster.

High Availability: Salesforce.com recently invested in three brand-new data centers to ensure the highest availability and service quality for customers.